P. Parrish - South Of Hell

“I wasn’t in love with her,” he said. “I was twenty, getting ready to start my senior year, and I had big plans for law school. Kyla was just…”

He stopped, realizing how shitty this was sounding.

“Just an easy lay?” Joe asked.

Louis looked up quickly. There was no judgment in her voice. It was just the way Joe talked, but still it stung.

“Not really,” he said. “I liked her, but I didn’t love her. I didn’t want to get involved with anyone then. I tried to let her down easy, but she kept calling. By January, it had gotten pretty bad. Finally, I stopped answering the phone.”

He paused again, a new memory slipping in. It wasn’t real important, but hell, he might as well tell her all of it.

“I was already seeing someone else.”

Joe sat back in the booth, her eyes fixed on his. “I think I will have a glass of wine.”

Louis left the table and walked to the bar. He kept his back to Joe as he waited, staring absently at the line of booze on the shelf but seeing faces in his head. Old faces came easily to him most of the time. Kyla’s was no different.

Skin the color of almonds. Hair always carefully arranged in a straightened sweep around her full, smooth cheeks. Eyelashes so long he could feel the brush of them against his face when he kissed her. Full lips, always glossy with cherry-red lipstick, something called Scarlet Fever. On anyone else, it would have looked cheap. On her, it was nothing but class.

The bartender set down a glass of red wine, and Louis took it back to the table. Joe had taken off her leather jacket and was sitting at an angle, her feet propped up on an empty chair. Fingers still working the napkin.

“House red okay?” he asked, setting the glass in front of her.

She nodded and took a drink before looking back at him. “So, if she didn’t matter to you then, why does she matter to you now?” she asked.

Louis let out a long, slow breath. “Somewhere around the end of February, she came up to my dorm room. It was sleeting hard that night, and she was soaked. And she was so mad she was shaking. She was screaming at me for not answering her calls. Guys were coming out of their rooms and watching all this, and I couldn’t calm her down.”

Louis looked up, making sure he had Joe’s eyes before he went on. “She told me she was pregnant,” he said.

Joe didn’t move, holding his stare for what seemed liked minutes, her eyes shifting with questions and possibilities.

Louis took a long swallow of his beer and set the bottle down slowly. It would have been easy to look away from Joe now, but he didn’t.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘I don’t want to fuck up my life.’” He hesitated. “The first thing out of my mouth was, ‘Get rid of it.’”

Joe pushed her glass aside, took her feet from the chair, and leaned back, drawing into the farthest corner of the booth. But her eyes never wavered from his face, and he still wasn’t sure what he was seeing there. He finally had to look away. Down at the green glass of the beer bottle. He focused on the little red star in the center of the beer label until it went blurry.

“She slapped me,” he said. “Then she started hitting me in the chest, so hysterical she could barely stay on her feet. Finally, she just stopped and looked at me and said, ‘Fine, I’ll just get rid of it.’”

“What did you say?” Joe asked.

“I said, ‘Go ahead.’”

Joe lowered her eyes. His found the exit sign over her bowed head and stayed there. The bar was quiet, not a sound, not even the clink of glasses. He wanted to look back at Joe, but he couldn’t. He was afraid if he did, something would different. Something would be gone.

Then Joe touched his hand, and he looked at her. “You’re a different man now,” she said. Her fingers laced themselves through his. “Which is probably a good thing. I could never fall in love with that other guy.”

Louis found a wry smile. “Yeah, well, that other guy gets worse,” he said. “A few days later, I borrowed a couple hundred dollars from my roommate and sent it to her to pay for the abortion.”

“You ever think much about why you reacted the way you did?”

Louis sat back, withdrawing his hand. “Fear,” he said. “Fear of being trapped, fear of being nothing.”

“Do you think you should go talk to her?” Joe asked.

“And say what?”

“Sometimes ‘I’m sorry’ is enough.”

Louis shook his head.

“Her husband must have had an eye on you since you got here,” Joe said. “That tells me she told him about you. Women don’t tell their men about other men in their past unless it was bad. You can apologize. Whether she accepts it or not is up to her.”

Louis was turning his empty bottle in circles on the scarred table.

“I have another thought to throw out at you,” Joe said.

“What?”

“Why do you think Channing even bothered to stop us and tell us who he was?”

“He didn’t want me anywhere near Kyla.”

“She hates you. You’re no threat to his marriage.”

“What are you getting at?” Louis asked.

“Maybe it’s not Kyla he wants you to stay away from.”

He knew exactly what Joe was suggesting, and the thought settled over his skin with an eerie tingle. Still, it took him a second to reshape it into any kind of real possibility.

“What if she didn’t have the abortion, Louis?” Joe asked.

But the question was in his head before Joe had even said it. And with it came the realization that the question had always been there inside him.

Some people spend the present doing nothing but revisiting the past. Louis thought his foster parents were often like that, always talking about past Christmases or trips up north. His friend Dodie was like that, too. Beer bottle in hand and a setting Florida sun behind him, his favorite opening to a conversation was, “When I was young…”

Louis had never seen the point. Good or bad, whatever it was, it was over. Why keep reliving something you couldn’t change? Or get back?

He wasn’t sure he felt that way anymore. Maybe it was because now he was making memories worth remembering. It had been different before. He had been different before. Before he had started spending time with twelve-year-old Ben Outlaw, who was teaching him the fine art of how much glue to put on a model spaceship. And before Joe, who was teaching him just how little glue it took to hold two people together.

He blew out a breath and stared at the house.

It was a two-story frame house on Catherine Street, painted a pale blue, with old-fashioned white shutters. A thicket of dormant rose bushes buffered the small porch. The blooms were probably beautiful in the summer. Colorful, like her.

He had found the address in a phone book. Not under Eric Channing, which was to be expected. He didn’t know any cop who listed a phone or address. Then he looked under Kyla and K. Channing but found nothing there, either. It was only when he was closing the book and feeling a guilty pang of relief that he decided to try once more and look under Brown.

There had been two K. Browns listed, one out near Ypsi and one here in Ann Arbor. He figured the Ann Arbor cops still had to live in the city, so this was where he had come first.

His heart was kicking up, and he looked around, trying to relax, hoping to spot something that would tell him if this was her home.

There was a newspaper lying on the narrow walk and a pair of rain boots sitting on the top step. Next to them was a cardboard box with halo hats stamped on the side in big black letters and a UPS invoice taped on top. There was no mailbox on the curb and no car in the drive.